The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers: Will they won’t they?

I was looking for something reasonably untaxing when Erin Somers’s novel popped up on NetGalley. Set in gentrified smalltown America, The Ten Year Affair follows Cora, Sam and their families through a decade after they meet and instantly click at a baby group.

She thought Eliot and Sam would get along. She could picture their pleasant, dick-swinging camaraderie. The way they’d know common people from schools they’d attended. The way they’d bond over totems of millennial soft masculinity: craft beer and Knausgaard and basketball and socialism.

Cora and Eliot have recently moved to what was once an industrial town now full of aspiring middle-class parents in their thirties busy trying to keep financially afloat but thrilled to own their first home. An easy day trip from the city, the town is visited by tourists cooing over the mountain setting, buying upmarket treats, envying the couples already established there, seeing none of the disadvantages of life in a small town. Cora escapes the drudgery of domesticity by indulging in fantasies of an affair with Sam after a brief kiss. Neither of them wants to be unfaithful but both want each other. While Eliot cooks supper, smokes a spliff on their porch, reads a manuscript for work, Cora’s in another timeline with Sam, spinning stories and visiting an out-of-town hotel in increasingly baroque fantasies. In the real world, they’re determined to keep a lid on it. Over the next ten years, parties are held, chores are done, the kids grow up, confidences are shared and secrets revealed as the families become increasingly entangled in each other’s lives.

But the affair was there now. It was between them. Somewhere in the multiverse, their alternates checked into a hotel room where the afternoon light came in at a slant and hit a champagne bucket just so.

Somers tells her story from Cora’s point of view injecting her narrative with a wry humour and enjoyably sharp social observation. Inevitably the ‘will they won’t they question’ hovers over it but essentially it’s a novel about marriage and how it survives – or doesn’t – the mundanity of everyday life lived with the same person for many years. Somers’s characterisation is astute – Cora is engaging and believable – a woman wanting an escape from the day-to-day rather than a full-blown affair with all the hurt and dishonesty that brings. The gossip, speculation and misinformation of small town life is smartly portrayed in this witty, acute exploration of marriage and infidelity which kept me entertained with its acerbic humour. I spotted Jenny Mustard’s name in the puffs which seemed a spot-on comparison to me.

Canongate Books: London 9781837264568 304pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)